New Relic SaaS Tool Provides Visibility into Mobile Apps

Most IT organizations have little to no visibility into what is rapidly becoming the most commonly used platform for running applications. While just about every organization these days either has or is about to deploy a mobile computing application, they are generally running blind when it comes to knowing how that application is actually being used.

New Relic today launched an application performance monitoring (APM) service for mobile computing applications that looks to provide real-time visibility into Apple iOS and Android applications. As part of this effort, New Relic also announced today partnerships with Adobe PhoneGap Build, Appcelerator, Parse and Stackmob, while also extending existing relationships with providers of application development platforms such as CloudBees, Joyent, Rackspace Hosting and Microsoft Windows Azure Mobile Services to include free mobile app monitoring for those environments.

According to New Relic President and COO Chris Cook, New Relic for Mobile Apps is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach that brings APM capabilities to a class of applications that are among the most fragile applications in the enterprise. Mobile applications tend to not only be overly dependent on external services that are accessed over application programming interfaces that can break at almost any time, but end users have a tendency to stop using them without providing much in the way of meaningful feedback.

For that reason, it’s not only important to monitor mobile applications during beta testing, but also to make sure developers have access to a continuous feedback loop.

Cook notes that in a world where one out of every four mobile applications gets used once and then abandoned, IT organizations really only get one chance to make a first impression. But once that impression is favorably made, any number of factors can result in a sudden surge of abandonment that can not only leave developers feeling unloved, but, worse yet, unemployed.